You know what the most disturbing thing is?

Most DRAM companies have operated at a net loss when taking into account the accumulated earnings of the last decade. There is incredibly fierce price competition within the industry.

Do you really feel ripped off when you buy a product that is composed of billions of transistors, has tens of billions of R&D costs behind at at a price of $1 ? (That was the price of a 1Gbit chip not long ago) I don't want to sound like an industry advocate here, but I find this pretty staggering.
Is the consumer really ripped off if he has to buy a product that is priced a few months behind Moores law?

Growing from $50m to $1B in five years would mean that the market for open sources increases twentyfold in just five years. OSS has been around since the 80ies, OSS companies have been around since the nineties. So it took 15 years for the market to grow to $50m, why on earth should it increase twentyfold in just five measly years? Like many analysts, he is just making up numbers.

Well, maybe it cannot be done because it is sealed into a rigid structure?

This sounds very much like a Dye-sensitized solar cell, also known as Graetzel cell.

Unfortunately that means that the new invention does probably share the same (unsolved) long term stability problems.

Aren't start-ups almost always spinoffs of a university or research institute? Liquavista is a spin-off of what used to be Philips Research (Natlab), one of last strongholds of real industrial research in Europe. It used to be a pretty amazing place, maybe the closest of what Europe had to the Bell Labs. Unfortunately it was messed up pretty badly during the last decade due to various splits, carve outs and a general move away from industry backed research.

Both Berlin and Paris had a networks with a total length of more than 400km.

obvious link

Fewer instructions does not always mean that the CPU architecture gets more optimized.

To my knowledge, in terms of gatecount this is the most efficient CPU around:

http://www.opencores.org/project,mcpu

32 Macrocells in a CPLD.

Actually you don't need superconductors for this. High-voltage direct current transmission lines are very well capable of delivering electricity with high efficiency across long distance without superconductors. Existing projects, like the Quebec-New Englad transmission line are capable of carrying >2GW of electrical energy over distances of >1100km. This is far more than even the largest photovoltaic power plant can generate today.

Generally agreed. But I'd like to point out the semiconductor manufacturing uses several "nanotechnology" methods besides lithography. For example the high-k deposition employs an atomic layer deposition process (ALD), that allows precise control of film thicknesses down to tenths of a monolayer. This is achieved by surface limited reactions, very similar to many techniques within the realm of "self-assembly" or bottom-up.

Having an "assembler" on the atomic level would of course be a long time goal. However it is very likely that this is not possible. Atomic interactions simply do not allow for arbitrary combinations of individual atoms.

well, not compared to entire chips, but single transistors.

Viruses and especially bacteria are huuge compared to microchips.

This is a cross section of the pmos transistors in one of Intels 45nm high-k metal gate CPUs. As you can see there are many layers with a horizontal and lateral extend far below 10 nm. In fact the thinnest layers are in the order of 1-2nm - The gate stack itself consists of a multilayer stack of SiO2/HfO2/TiN, where each of the layers is only 1-3 nm thick.

How is this not nanotechnology?

Most of the known bottom up approaches that are hyped and studied at universities, such as nanoparticles and nanowires, lead to significantly larger structures.

Top down beat bottom up years ago. Sorry guys, it's a nice phd topic but the industry is already there.

not been physically realized and connected with that theory until recently.

Actually that is not true. Resistive switching had been demonstrated even before 1971 (there are some examples on Wikipedia).

Let's see, what happened here?

1) Someone found resistive switching
2) Someone developed a trivial algebraic model of a resistor with a memory effect
3) Someone with good marketing skills and connections combines 1) and 2) and manages to ram a paper into Nature.
4) Lots of press hype ensues
5) Profit? nope. Novel? nope. Publicity? Way too much, given for the nonevent. Application? Was already there at 1) in form of RRAM.

Did anybody notice that a new class of high temperature superconductors was found recently? Or multiferroics? Or commercial availability of phase change memory (PCRAM), which may render RRAM obselete before it went anywhere?

s/MTI/MIT

Sorry to be so harsh, but the specific experiment reported here is of little to none value outside of science. Why?

Hysteretic resistive switching in metal oxide systems is a well known phenomenon (RRAM) and occurs in all transition metal oxides with noble eletrodes. This is what has been recristened as "Memrestor" by HP. It is widely agreed upon that this switching mechanism is due to a redox reaction where oxygen is added or removed from the insulator. The specifics (filament, interfacial barrier lowering etc.) are still subject of current research though.

The experiment in the paper takes a slightly different approach: vanadium oxide has a very interesting property where its resistance switches apruptly by orders of magnitude at a certain temperature due to a reorganisation of its electronic structure. This phenomenon is known as metal to insulator (MTI) transition and has been research for at least 50 years.

The MTI has a hysteretic behavior which means that it retains its state if you vary the temperature only a little above or below the critical MTI temperature Tc. The researchers have now shown that if you keep the temperature of the system close to Tc, you can use an additional electric current to switch the resistivity of the system. A possible explanation could be self heating.

Why is it useless for practical application?

1) The phenomenon instrinsically only works at a certain temperature. Deviations by fractions of degrees K will destroy all information.

2) As far as I can see they only demonstrated electrical switching into one direction. To erase the memory both would be required.

All in all a nice experiment, but again with typical university style hype, piggybacking on the Memristor craze.

I am also relatively certain that current driven MTI switching has been reported before. I am aware of a couple of experiments where a field switched MTI transition was proposed for transistors. Those devices should exhibit exactly the same hysteresis and "memory" properties.